Category: Freud and Psychoanalysis

This article was originally published on The Conversation, here. I have altered the styling slightly.

In the late nineteenth century, Sigmund Freud’s colleague Wilhelm Fleiss successfully diagnosed an illness in one of Freud’s relatives, without even having met them. Freud was so impressed by Fleiss’s “diagnostic acumen” that he went on to advocate the method in certain circumstances. Freud would write that diagnosing someone without personally examining them was acceptable where the features of certain disorders, such as paranoid schizophrenia (then known as dementia paranoides), made the interview process counterproductive. Here, Freud noted that “a written report or a printed case history can take the place of personal acquaintance with the patient.”

Now, a controversial debate about the ethics of diagnosis at a distance or long-distance diagnosis has arisen in the US. It has come about as commentators have proposed that President Donald Trump suffers from narcissistic personality disorder(NPD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), among other conditions. Health professionals have weighed in as well. Psychotherapist and former assistant professor of psychiatry John D. Gartner has been particularly vehement in his assessment of the President. Gartner asserts that Trump suffers from malignant narcissism, a specific manifestation of NPD.

According to the DSM-5—the authoritative psychiatric manual—this condition is characterised by various “traits of antagonism”, including “manipulativeness, deceitfulness, [and] callousness.” Notably, the DSM-5 names the condition only once throughout its hundreds of pages; and some academic psychiatrists say the disorder is understudied and its features largely unsettled, with no treatment yet established.

Despite this, Gartner is convinced that the president’s conduct fulfils the criteria of malignant narcissism—even without having interviewed him:

We’ve seen enough public behaviour by Donald Trump now that we can make this diagnosis indisputably.

Recently, the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA) issued a memo to its more than 3,500 members, advising they were “free to comment about political figures as individuals”, and that the APsaA did not regard “political commentary by its individual members an ethical matter.”

By contrast, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) has long maintained a strict ethical stance on the open discussion of public figures’ mental states. Enshrined in the so-called Goldwater rule, the APA’s prescription cautions psychiatrists against diagnosis at a distance. As former APA President Herbert Sacks put it, psychiatrists should avoid engaging in “psychobabble,” especially when it comes to politicians. He said that, when “reported by the media,” such diagnostic speculation only “undermines psychiatry as a science.” Although the Goldwater rule is not enshrined in Australian law, a code of ethics provides guidance to Australian psychiatrists about their conduct in the media.

What is the Goldwater Rule?

The Goldwater rule is named after an incident involving Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater. Having been defeated in the 1964 US election, Goldwater sued the editor of the shortlived political magazine Fact for defamation. Just one month before the election, Fact’s front page had printed a controversial declaration:

1,189 psychiatrists say Goldwater is psychologically unfit to be president!

Fact had conducted a broad but clinically invalid survey, providing questionnaires to more than 12,000 psychiatrists whose details the magazine had obtained from the American Medical Association’s membership list. Of the 2,417 responses it received, some 1,189 psychiatrists asserted Goldwater was unfit for office.

In the feature article, Fact purported to quote many of the psychiatrists it had surveyed, and used their words to suggest that Goldwater was a “megalomaniac, paranoid, and grossly psychotic”, and even suffering from “schizophrenia.” In the trial that followed, Goldwater was awarded some US$75,000 in punitive damages—enough to ensure that Fact never published another issue. The ruling raised disturbing questions for the APA, threatening not only the reputation of the psychiatric profession, but the future livelihoods of practitioners. In slightly different circumstances, a psychiatrist might face similar civil action, whether “for invasion of privacy or defamation of character.”

On occasion psychiatrists are asked for an opinion about an individual who is in the light of public attention or who has disclosed information about himself/herself through public media. In such circumstances, a psychiatrist may share with the public his or her expertise about psychiatric issues in general.

However, it is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement.

The Rule in Dispute

Many academic psychiatrists disagree with the rule. Some have suggested that breaking the Goldwater rule is ethical when it’s necessary to diagnose “mass murderers” from afar, or when “the importance of the diagnosis of an individual … rise[s] to the level of a national threat.” Others have criticised the rule more generally, calling it “an excessive organisational response” to “an inflammatory and embarrassing moment for American psychiatry.” And one psychiatrist has recently described the prescription as “American society’s gag rule.” In February this year, the New York Times published a letter signed by some 33 psychiatrists who blamed the rule for silencing them at this “critical time”. They wrote that “too much [was] at stake to be silent any longer”, and that Donald Trump’s “emotional instability” had made him “incapable of serving safely as president.”

The tension between the APA and its members, and between the APA and the APsaA, partly reflects the history of the two disciplines. Since the 1940s, psychiatry has increasingly focused on medical interventions, while tending to neglect the “in-depth talk therapies” which, despite their general decline, remain central to the psychoanalytic method.

But the situation is still more complicated than this. After all, the methods of psychiatrists and psychoanalysts often overlap. In many practices, for instance, psychiatrists employ intuitive reasoning in the diagnostic process. For some diagnosticians, the so-called “Praecox-Gefühl” or “praecox feeling” remains at the “clinical core” of diagnosing schizophrenia, despite the method’s varied reliability. First described in the 1940s, the praecox feeling is a complex, emotionally charged intuitive sense that a psychiatrist sometimes gets when detecting the subtle symptoms of an emergent psychosis.

What now for the Goldwater rule?

That psychoanalysts may wish to distinguish themselves from psychiatrists on the Goldwater rule, and vice versa, is unsurprising. In countless ways—more than can be named here—psychoanalysts and psychiatrists adopt different views of their roles in the diagnostic process. This is the result of their different training backgrounds, histories, and professional cultures.

Less expected, however, is the growing feeling among psychoanalysts and psychiatrists alike, that today, more than ever, the Goldwater rule should be set aside. While neither group may wish to admit it, the Trump era may have brought psychiatrists and psychoanalysts closer together—at least on this point.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Sigmund Freud and his otolaryngologist friend Wilhelm Fleiss parted ways in bitter disagreement. The men’s vexation arose before a lethiferous background of cocaine use and abuse, and was ultimately ended by that same route, with the pair discovering they had developed a difference of opinion about cocaine’s medical usefulness. But before they disbanded, Freud often expressed his deep admiration for Fleiss (and not only because he had originally agreed with his colleague that cocaine was a wonderful medicine, particularly for nose and throat complaints). “My respect for your diagnostic acumen has only increased further,” wrote Freud in a letter to Fleiss on June 28, 1892, after Fleiss had accurately diagnosed an illness in one of Freud’s relatives. But what was so impressive to Freud was that Fleiss had reached his diagnosis from afar, without even having met the patient. It was an exemplary case of what has come to be known as “diagnosis at a distance” or “long-distance diagnosis,” and a skill that Freud greatly admired in his friend, a kind of parascient force of perception that Freud himself wished to attain.

By the mid-1890s, however, Freud had begun to sense that he had developed not just an admiring attachment to his colleague, but a professional dependency. It was a reliance that went further than the regular solicitation of cocaine prescriptions from his friend, who was authorised to prescribe the drug. With some insight, Freud identified that he had come to rely on his colleague’s ability to accurately diagnose his and his family members’ illnesses. His adulation would not last. In his “technique papers,” beginning in about 1912 with “Dynamics of Transference,” Freud began to eschew the notion, at least implicitly, that a medical professional could adequately establish a “clinical picture” of their patient’s illness without significant analysis. As Freud would note, the patient should be seen in situ, and often for a minimum of some weeks, before any assessment could be made of their illness. And sometimes even more preparation would be needed. Difficult cases required a “trial analysis to determine the patient’s analyzability,” a preliminary meeting in which the patient’s potential for successful analysis could be adjudged. Perhaps one of the reasons that Freud would come to regard the consultation as so important was that he felt it could allow the clinician to discriminate between what Freud recognised as the two fundamental kinds of neurosis. On the one hand, there were what Freud called the “actual neuroses.” These were those disorders that had a physiological aetiology. On the other hand, there were the “psychogenic neuroses,” those disorders that had derived from early childhood trauma, such as the hysterical, obsessional, or anxiety-centered disorders.

As Steven J. Ellman has argued, Freud’s distinction between actual and psychogenic neuroses probably stemmed from his inability to observe “transference” reactions in those whose neuroses were “actual” or biological. These latter neuroses did not require psychoanalysis at all—which is to say, they did not require the retrieval of pathogenic memories—but instead needed physical treatment. The patient might need to exercise more, for instance; or, as was Freud’s more characteristic prescription, they might need to engage in more sexual activity, to release or discharge their libidinal energy or cathexes more often. The “actual” neuroses, after all, were not generally responsive to the psychoanalytic method, located, as they were, in the body. By contrast, the psychogenic neuroses were distinguished—and indeed could be diagnosed—by the appearance of transferences in the patient. These transference reactions are, in Freud’s formulation, the acted-out simulacra of the same original impulses that gave rise to the neurosis ab initio. But these impulses would now find a new object, a new target, in the figure of the psychoanalyst. Instead of the figure who originally engendered them through trauma, it was the analyst who would now be treated as though they had authored the originary trauma. As such, these transferences could quite sharply bring into view the shape and severity of the pathogenic memory.

Freud’s description of the transferences as early as 1905 augurs the significant role they will later play in his psychoanalytic framework. “What are the transferences?,” he asks in “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria.” His answer is instructive:

They are new editions or facsimiles of the impulses and phantasies which are aroused and made conscious during the progress of the analysis; but they have this peculiarity, which is characteristic for their species, that they replace some earlier person by the person of the physician. To put it another way: a whole series of psychological experiences are revived, not as belonging to the past, but as applying to the person of the physician at the present moment. Some of these transferences have a content which differs from that of their model in no respect whatever except for the substitution. These then—to keep to the same metaphor—are merely new impressions or reprints.

Different to resistances, transference reactions are reactive behaviours in the patient that, though revealing the shape of the pathology, may yet mark an obstacle to be overcome. While the transferences point to the terrain of the pathogenic material, they may still be conceived of as impediments in analysis, blocks that stand in the way of recovering the true nature of the pathogenic memory. For this reason, Freud came to regard transference as a kind of resistance in “The Dynamics of Transference.” But by their nature, they were more than simple resistances, more then defenses to the treatment itself, and more than frustrations born of disinterest or boredom. For in the way that they revived the patient’s past psychological experiences, the transferences pointed rather ostensibly to the general source of the patient’s neurosis, and constituted a trace of the distressing psychogenic memory. It is because of their character, then, that the transferences can be seen (as Merton Gill has seen them) as “the only vehicle of the analytic situation.” For the point of psychoanalysis (depending on one’s theoretical orientation) is less to actually retrieve or recollect the patient’s childhood memories so much as to analyse the dynamics of this transference reaction itself, to master its mechanisms, and, in so doing, to control the power of those memories by proxy.

Freud’s development of a theory of transference, as well as his earlier distinction between the actual and psychogenic neuroses, is likely to have been partly engendered by his feud with Fleiss. Indeed, even if the dynamics and ramifications of the Fleiss–Freud relationship are in many ways still uncharted, one of the things on which historians of psychoanalysis seem increasingly to agree is that Freud’s dissociation from Fleiss was a catalyst for the neurologist’s transition from biology-centered medicine to psychology-based psychoanalysis. When Freud and his colleague went their separate ways, it was a symbolic break: Freud’s rejection of his friend represented a rejection of his physicalist methods, just as his rejection of Breuer before him had been a rejection of Breuer’s methods (that is, of hypnotherapy and hypnosis). Perhaps more interestingly, though, it would be on the day after his own father’s funeral, on the 26th of October, 1896, that Freud would pronounce in a letter to Fleiss, in dramatic passive voice, that he had taken the decision to kick the cocaine habit. “Incidentally, the cocaine brush has been completely put aside,” he wrote to his colleague summarily. It was this break not just from the drug but from his colleague—from the man who had shown him how to diagnose from a distance—that allowed Freud to apprehend the imaginative vision of a “new science” of psychoanalysis, to “imagine,” as Justin Clemens has put it, “the possibility of the isolation of language itself as a force of transformation.” If, from this moment onward, Freud could evade “the problems of treating human psychology as if it were reducible to physiology,” it was because he had constituted the perfect litmus test for his intuition that the mind could overpower matter. His ability to abstain from cocaine would be a proof of his theory: that many of the neuroses were not biological but psychogenic.

Now more than a century after the publication of Freud’s first psychoanalytic works—whether one marks his Studies on Hysteria (1895) or The Interpretation of Dreams (1901) as the inaugurating text—psychiatrists and psychoanalysts alike tend to caution against the notion of diagnosis at a distance. However, a number of psychiatrists remain tempted to throw these cautions to the wind—together with the professional statute, known as the “Goldwater rule,” which aims to guard against what the APA president Herbert Sacks called “psychobabble”: that idle speculation about a public figure’s mental illness that, when “reported by the media, undermines psychiatry as science.” Known more formally as section 7, rule 3 of the American Psychiatric Association’s professional ethical code, the Goldwater rule was drafted after the 1964 Presidential election in which Republican Senator and Presidential nominee Barry Goldwater was defeated by incumbent President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Goldwater had sued the now-defunct Fact magazine after it conducted a survey of members of the American psychiatric profession, calling on more than 12,000 psychiatrists to provide their professional assessment of the Republican candidate. Highly unscientific, the survey yielded almost 1,200 responses, a huge cachet of long-distance diagnoses, all of which had been scathing in their assessment of the Arizona Senator. The result was published in Fact’s next issue, its cover declaring starkly that “1,189 Psychiatrists say Goldwater is Psychologically Unfit to be President!” As Sacks, the later president of the APA, commented in his presidential column in 1999, “The bulk of the political responses, couched in psychiatric terminology, were so unfair and so outrageous to Goldwater that he sued and won a substantial settlement.”

Following this incident, the APA issued a number of press releases that denounced such instances of long-distance diagnosis. But no less than nine years would pass before that the APA would formally enshrine the Goldwater rule in its ethical code, a short rule book titled Principles of Medical Ethics with Annotations Especially Applicable to Psychiatry published in 1973. Last updated in 2013, this current version of the code renders the Goldwater rule as follows:

On occasion psychiatrists are asked for an opinion about an individual who is in the light of public attention or who has disclosed information about himself/herself through public media. In such circumstances, a psychiatrist may share with the public his or her expertise about psychiatric issues in general. However, it is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement.

Practitioners and scholars have recently discussed reasons or justifications for dismissing the Goldwater rule in certain circumstances, such as when the diagnosis of a particular individual might be necessary for “national security” purposes, such as to avoid a situation in which the would-be patient might “rise to the level of a national threat” in the absence of such a diagnosis. If such arguments are to be accepted among the psychiatric fraternity, then it is indeed possible that the diagnosis of powerful figures or even state leaders, such as Donald J. Trump or Vladimir Putin—each of whom has recently been subject to diagnosis at a distance, variously by lay people and specialist practitioners—may be, in some circumstances, justifiable, which is to say not a breach of the ethical principles that underpin the Goldwater rule. What those circumstances may involve, however, remains unclear.

In any case, it is notable that a range of commentators have recently offered their diagnostic evaluation of Trump, variously diagnosing him with narcissistic personality disorder, “psychopathic narcissism,” and ADHD. But among the many who have offered their diagnostic hypothesis, one of the most prominent diagnosticians, John D. Gartner, a practicing psychotherapist who has previously trained psychiatric residents at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, has informally diagnosed Trump with “malignant narcissism.” Also the author of a book on former president Bill Clinton titled In Search of Bill Clinton: A Psychological Biography, Gartner might be said to work, perhaps unwittingly, not as a psychiatrist as such, but in an interdisciplinary field that is increasingly notable in literary and psychology studies, a field in which the ethical codes of the APA need not apply: that is, in the field of psychobiography.

But what is psychobiography? William Todd Schultz, professor of psychology at Pacific University, editor of the Oxford University Press’s (OUP) psychobiographical series “Inner Lives,” and author of the OUP’s Handbook of Psychobiography (2005), describes the subdiscipline as “the analysis of historically significant lives through the use of psychological theory and research.” The “aim” of psychobiography, he continues, is “to understand persons, and to uncover the private motives behind public acts, whether those acts involve the making of art or the creation of scientific theories, or the adoption of political decisions.” What psychiobiography is not, Schultz emphasises, is “pathography.” As Schultz notes,

People are not diagnoses. A diagnosis is a name—a label—not a true explanation. What we want to know is how someone became who she is, not what her DSM-derived “disease” might be.

Schultz’s remarks recall the “label theorists” who participated in the anti- or critical-psychiatry debates—those such as Frank Tannenbaum or Erving Goffman. However, Schultz’s definition of psychobiography also suggests the importance of developing a detailed, complex, and essentially non-diagnostic description of the person under study. Outside of the psychiatric profession’s ethics code, then, the Goldwater rule might be seen as little more than a disciplinary persuasion. Whereas the scholar who produced a full and rich account of a historical person’s personality might be said to produce a psychobiography, those whose focus remains on diagnosis might be said to engage in pathography.

Despite Schultz’s apparent misgivings, there is also arguably a place for pathography. Indeed, one of the most fascinating aspects of pathography is the potential for the diagnostic hypothesis it produces—its speculation about the subject’s mental disorder—to be revealed as true. In this way, the work of pathography might resemble the work speculative fiction: it always offers a glimpse at a possible future, providing its reader or consumer with what Philip K. Dick called a “shock of dysrecognition” or what Darko Suvin called a sense of “cognitive estrangement.” As both Dick and Suvin knew, the role of science and speculative fiction is not simply to adumbrate a vision of a possible future; rather, it also serves to unveil an alternate present—to expose an underlying layer of our present-day reality—and in so doing to unsettle the prevailing understanding of what is currently possible, and of what is currently real. Indeed, it is exactly the uncertainty of the pathographer’s proposed diagnosis—the impossibility of confirming or disproving their pathographic speculation—that is fascinating. The question is not the formal one that involves a purely scientific process: “Can this diagnosis be verified as legitimate?” It is an informal, preternatural one, a question of faith in what I have called the diagnostician’s “parascient force of perception”: “Has the long-distance diagnostician uncovered the reality of the subject’s mental state?” In most cases, the latter question is often necessarily the only one that may be posed: for instance, the diagnosis may be of a deceased person, or of a political actor, in which case it is impossible for a consultation, for a formal psychiatric interview, to be carried out.

But even in the absence of a scientific trial, and in the absence of any statistically significant evidence, it can be illuminating to work through the pathographic speculation. If we return to Gartner’s diagnosis of Trump, for example—to his pathographic speculation that Trump is a malignant narcissist—we immediately notice the specificity of the diagnosis itself: it is malignant narcissism, rather than the more formal, more stable category of narcissistic personality disorder or NPD. To understand Gartner’s thinking, we must next look for the texts from which this specific diagnosis has been drawn. Doing so, we note that the term “malignant narcissism” appears in the DSM-V only once, and, even then, it appears in scare quotations and in parentheses, as though the designation were not a criteria-based index so much as a shorthand for a yet-unknown quantity, a disorder that one “knows when they see it.” The specific text reads as follows:

Trait and personality functioning specifiers may be used to record additional personality features that may be present in narcissistic personality disorder but are not required for the diagnosis. For example, other traits of Antagonism (e.g., manipulativeness, deceitfulness, callousness) are not diagnostic criteria for narcissistic personality disorder (see Criterion B) but can be specified when more pervasive antagonistic features (e.g., “malignant narcissism”) are present.

Malignance, then, is an “additional personality specifier” of those with NPD; it is not, at least according to the DSM-V, a discrete personality disorder in and of itself, one that is separate from NPD. Nevertheless, some scholars working in mental health have identified malignant narcissism as “a serious condition [that is] largely ignored in psychiatric literature and research,” and a disorder that is especially difficult to diagnose because there is “no structured interview or self-report measure that identifies Malignant Narcissism and proposes a foundation for treatment.” A long-distance diagnosis of Trump with malignant narcissism, then, may be no more unclear, no less verifiable, than a diagnosis born of a detailed clinical analysis, so ambiguous is the specifier.

Still, others have identified the particular relevancy of “malignant narcissism” to the figure of the tyrant. In an examination of the psychological literature of politics (a field sometimes called “psychopolitics”), Betty Glad implicitly adverts to the insufficiency of the DSM-IV (as was then the latest edition) and its definition of malignant narcissism, appealing not to the manual for clarification but to the descriptive elaborations of Otto Kernberg, Vamik Volkan, and Jerrold Post—all academic psychiatrists—to supplement and reconfigure the “related subtypes” of narcissistic personality disorder that have been thus far proposed. Glad even suggests the inadequacy of the DSM’s theoretical foundation when she notes that the manual has been developed out of normative consultative experience, and published in order to provide guidelines for those situations in which the patient or subject could be expected to conform to the dysfunctions pervasive in the general population. By contrast, the dysfunctions observable in some figures—and, in the case of her analysis, the figure of the tyrannical political leader—actually lie outside of the normative parameters of dysfunction that arise in the general treatment of the population; accordingly, the DSM cannot be relied on to account for the dysfunctions of these individuals. As she writes,

Classification systems developed via clinical experience with persons who have been diagnosed as dysfunctional may need further elaboration for major political leaders. To understand the tyrant, we need to investigate the careers of individuals who have been successful in gaining absolute power in a broader political environment. Building on the work of Robins and Post (1997), we provide a basis for delineating, in a systematic manner, the advantages a malignant narcissist has in securing power in a chaotic or otherwise difficult situation. As discussed below, the attainment of nearly absolute power in the real world serves him while at the same time contributing to the psychological deterioration and behavioral overshooting that may lead to his eventual political undoing.

Here, then, we see another way in which breaching the Goldwater rule may be justified—and not simply because one’s theoretical or disciplinary orientation, as I have outlined above, might enable one to claim they are simply speculating about the disorder as a pathographer, only musing as a curious dilettante, rather than offering an official diagnosis as a practising psychiatrist. Rather, the psychiatrist must deal with an inadequate manual, inadequate firstly because it is does not define the diagnosis narrowly enough, and because, secondly, its parameters, which are drawn from a normativised history of “clinical experience,” do not account for the particular dysfunction of the unusual patient. Faced with this impasse, the psychiatrist may decide to conduct a long-distance diagnosis, if only to simulate the consultation with, to gain some hypothetical access to, the unusual case study, who—often largely because of their unusualness, their anormativity—cannot be brought under the observation of the psychiatrist in any event. Thus, the psychiatrist must at once imagine the consultative experience, as well as newly define the disorder that the patient possesses—a disorder that is outside of the parameters of the instructive text. In this way, the long-distance psychoanalyst conducts a kind of clinical research both into the new diagnostic category, the new nosology, and the degree to which it might be accessed in the general population.

But for all this, others still have warned against long-distance diagnosis, and for reasons quite apart from the Goldwater rule, which seemed largely a fearful and defensive reaction to the likelihood of psychiatrists’ liability rather than a pure expression of ethical principle. For example, in what might be seen as an ironic countertransference, many psychiatric scholars have mused on the mental health of the psychiatrist Emil Kraeplin, although just as many have warned against the practice. Kraeplin, of course, remains “one of the most prominent and potentially controversial in contemporary psychiatry,” partly because he exhibited so many objectionable intellectual interests, including a belief in the potential for “negative eugenics” to “prevent the occurrence of ‘degenerative phenomena.’” As in the case of the tyrant, however, it is here that we see the borderlines that usually separate the discourses of epistemology, politics, and psychiatry transform into a blurry, complex, furrow. As the authors of one study have cautioned, the psychiatrist who is tempted to diagnose Kraeplin from a place and time far removed from the late-nineteenth-century, from Kraeplin’s world, will surely compromise their own professional and intellectual credibility.

But to engage in such retrospective, long-distance diagnosis and to subsume Kraepelin’s personality under the diagnostic categories of contemporary psychiatric systems is dubious in the extreme and may well reveal more about the convictions and interests of today’s psychiatrists than about the historical “patient” Emil Kraepelin. Moreover, attempts at such retrospective diagnoses put psychiatrists on the horns of professional dilemma. If they are to bring their professional expertise to bear on Kraepelin, then they must simultaneously compromise the very methods and standards on which their own expertise rests. They must forego that most important source of diagnostic information: the patient examination.

After all, one need not diagnose an intellectual figure, need not appeal to psychiatry, to characterise a person’s ideas as wrongheaded. A racist or xenophobic argument or theory should be equally as wrong when expressed by a person free of any mental illness as when expressed by someone who has received a positive psychiatric diagnosis.

Because if Kraepelin is a controversial figure, it is at least partly due to his endorsement of the Lamarckian psychiatric concept of “pathogenic inheritance,” a concept perhaps first introduced in modern psychiatry by Bénédict Augustin Morel. Morel had also coined the neologism démence précoce in 1852 to identify a new nosological category, one that is today better known as schizophrenia. Against the backdrop of the political developments of the early twentieth century, Kraepelin’s support for research into racial hygiene, and his sympathies for the political goals of that work, has been the source of great controversy. And it is this, perhaps, that has led some to attempt to diagnose Kraeplin with a mental illness.

In 2013, Polity press published a translation of a similar work, first published in 2009, by two German scholars, the one, Hans-Joachim Neumann, a professor of medicine, and the other, Henrik Eberle, an historian. The scholars had attempted to diagnose Adolf Hitler once and for all, to settle the matter in what they called a “final diagnosis.” Titled Was Hitler Ill? A Final Diagnosis, the book is far from the first attempt to diagnose Hitler, and, as a comprehensive Wikipedia entry titled “Psychopathography of Adolf Hitler” makes clear, no less than 28 formal attempts have been made to systematically diagnose the Nazi leader, who has been said to have had all manner of mental disorders, from hysteria to schizophrenia, psychopathy to posttraumatic stress disorder, and asperger’s syndrome to abnormal brain lateralisation. Among the most famous diagnoses of Hitler was that produced by Walter Charles Langer, who was commissioned by the OSS (the precursor to the CIA) to develop psychological reports on Hitler before the end of the Second World War. Based on the testimony of psychiatrist Karl Kroner, Langer and his team proposed that Hitler had been treated in 1918 for hysteria, although the psychiatrist who treated him in a military hospital, Edmund Forster, had suicided in 1933, fearful of being interrogated.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Langer’s hypothesis is that, because Hitler, in Mein Kampf, actually dates his decision to become a politician “to his hospitalization in the Pomeranian military hospital of Pasewalk in November 1918, where he experienced the end of the World War 1,” Hitler probably underwent some form of failed hypnosis there, or had suffered some form of hysteria in that hospital, which then triggered his will to rise to power and led to the efflorescence of his hysteria as a dictator. Interestingly, however, this period of time remains to this day, as Norman Ächtler notes, one of the “last opaque spots in Hitler’s biography.” So while the notion that Hitler underwent something of a conversion in the hospital—perhaps because he was being treated for mustard gas—is indeed a tantalising idea, the details are simply too scant to conclude with any certainty that any such conversion, any such “break with reality,” took place. It is a period that eludes even Neumann and Eberle, who rightly note that, while Hitler’s placement in the “neurology and psychiatry ward at Pasewalk field hospital would . . . appear to indicate a psychogenic condition,” Hitler’s subsequent actions are unlikely to have been a “product of an unsuccessful hypnosis” in Pasewalk, but instead would have “evolved slowly over a long period.” Indeed, as Neumann and Eberle finally note at the end of their volume, “the leader of the NSDAP, chancellor of the German Reich and commander-in-chief of the German Wehrmacht was healthy and accountable.”

Perhaps one of the most responsible, albeit frightful, speculations we could make, then, is that a similar pathography as Hitler’s might now apply to those currently in similar positions of power, and to those who harbour impulses that are similarly tyrannical. To be sure, if made subject to psychiatric evaluation, dictators and tyrants may well be revealed to be malignant narcissists. However, it is also important to come to grips with the possibility that a seeming dictator may also be just as likely to exhibit no relevant symptoms, to act out no telling transferences, and so to be given a “clean bill of mental health” by the diagnostician. Alas, even if we accept that the ethical parameters outlined by the Goldwater rule are on occasion transgressible—after all, they are parameters designed to constrain professional psychiatrists in their media and public relations—what Freud implicitly understood as the defect of long-distance diagnosis remains insuperable. Having no ability to perceive a subject’s reactions, and having no capacity to observe the dynamics of their personal, extemporaneous “account” of what their actions mean, what their decision-making processes involve, one can but speculate as to what, exactly, those reactions, those transferences, might be.

Busywork, or work that keeps one busy but serves no value in and of itself, is variously familiar to us all. But busywork seems just as likely to affect the lives of researchers, of “knowledge workers,” as it is to bear upon those of other professionals—if not more likely. Indeed, if academics are not excoriating the increasing intensity of the administrative tasks and duties they must perform in their day-to-day lives, they are likely to be heard speaking of “administrative creep” and “administrative glut,” the suggestive expressions given, respectively, to the unstanchable rise of non-academic positions, and the disproportionate load of administrative staff members appointed to them, within modern universities. But these commiserations, of course, amount only to a synecdochic dismissal of busywork more generally, a eulogy for a time in which the predomination of administrative tasks in academia was allegedly less pronounced.

But even the academic blog risks becoming an exemplary instance of work that keeps its author busy, but serves no material purpose. Despite its potential popularity, the blog post, it seems, could never substitute for the gold standard of academic publishing, namely, the refereed (peer-reviewed) journal article, especially when it comes to the assessment of professional academic achievement, the inevitable instance in which one academic’s research profile and activities are adjudged against those of their peers, whether for a new job, a promotion, or an award. That the blog may still be regarded less as research proper than as a category of professional service must seem instinctively true to many researchers, even despite the fact that many authorities, both within and outside academic institutions, have urged academics to blog. Of course, as I write this post, the advantages that the blog imparts to one in improving their research toolkit—their set of writing and reading skills—seem obvious. Blogs can surely help researchers to formulate their thoughts, to express their ideas more clearly, and to improve their writing. What is more, an academic blog, as many have argued before, promises to grow one’s readership, to pique the interest if other researchers and would-be readers—even (although it is quite difficult to know for certain) to create a positive impression in the minds of those considering one’s potential productivity as a scholar, or one’s status as a “public intellectual,” if not a tenured or full-time one.

But (to return to where I began) the academic blog may also be categorised as busywork, as a mode of pointless, repetitive, habitualised writing, just as readily as it may be understood as a skill-honing praxis or a “lead generator.” For even as it transpires to improve one’s writing, to enhance one’s effectiveness as a composer of text, or to bolster one’s reputation outside the cloisters, the academic blog, unfortunately, is the wrong kind of text for attaining scholarly cachet. For as many academics will admit, the academic blog has proved unlikely to offer anything of value to the job-seeking scholar in the cold, increasingly market-led and budget-aware academic economy, the specular (read: intercitational) institution in which one’s status as a knowledge producer, as a “productive,” output-driven academic professional, is paramount, and less affirmed by the volume of one’s voice before the world at large (much less the world wide web) than by the frequency of one’s citations among one’s institutional colleagues. The academic economy, of course, has myriad persuasive reasons for remaining in this way so hermetic and self-enclosed. After all, the university, at least when it comes to knowledge, cannot be expected to respond to populism or celebrity—other than when for specific disciplinary purposes, of course.

In a 2016 essay commiserating the death of the academic film blog, a form whose life, we learn, lasted a mere fifteen years (from 2000 to 2015), Amanda Klein observes the unfortunate truth about digital academic discourse. The problem is that the impact of the research, however obvious it may appear to the author, just cannot be measured, or at least cannot be quantified in the same way that the peer-reviewed journal article is purported to be quantifiable—namely, by citations. Mourning the death of the academic blog, specifically that of the film scholar, Klein argues that the form simply

did not yield the legitimacy so many of us hoped for. Despite my best efforts to demonstrate the value of my own blog—citing research opportunities it unearthed, connections made in the field, and the way the medium forced me to grapple with new and exciting ideas I never would have explored on paper—the glaring absence of traditional peer review makes it difficult to quantify how blogging has impacted my research, teaching and service (the holy trifecta of academic values), even though it has greatly contributed to all three.

Klein’s experience makes obvious the fact that academic blogging occurs in an ecology or environment that is decidedly more “digital” than that of traditional, refereed academic research. But her essay also indicates how the academic world has yet to embrace or trust, much less to adapt to, the new parameters, the new rules, of this digital ecology. Not only is the academic blog post never expected to be published in paper form, neither by its author nor its reader; it is also understood as a different kind of research work, with a distinctive set of aims, to that which is published under the consraints of the review process. Understood less as the site of formal knowledge transmission than a means by which to report or disseminate the act of knowledge making, the academic blog can do little more than advise its reader that, somewhere else, in the heterotopia of real work, of bona fide erudition, knowledge has been, is being, or will soon be made. The busywork of the academic blog may consist in adumbrating its shape, in sketching this knowledge at some spatio-temporal distance from its origin, but rarely will it substitute for the work itself.

More formally, we know that the academic blog is a work in which an author’s references will usually go uncited (instead taking the form of hyperlinks—although an exception, of course, is this blog), and one in which the author’s arguments go unreviewed by their peers. In fact, the entire system in which blogging occurs—from the initial administrative processes (finding and commissioning a webhost, developing a content management system, paying for hosting, and so on), to the production processes (perhaps writing within a CMS rather than a word processor, uploading or publishing work unilaterally or independently, rather than by means of a collaborative, bilateral email process)—takes place outside of the academic publishing system, and in reality at many removes from the standard peer-review process. What is more, the blog, at least in theory, is sometimes understood as a provisional, temporary, reviewable, and redactable form. Unlike the apparent permanence of the printed page, the material life of the blog post is at once unreliable and indeterminable. The effects of the blog’s perceived impermanence are both epistemological and technological, as if leaving the impression of text on paper marked a grand point of termination, an authoritative condition of finality, and a truly “material” imprimatur of authority, that the blog post can never receive, can never engender on its own.

But the material and conceptual distinction between the digital page and the printed one—between, say, the online website and the analogue book—is by now an old and overstated one. If anything, it is a distinction or dichotomy with many comparable antecedents, such as that between page and screen, or between stage and screen, distinctions that, in the broadest of practical terms, cannot be said to affect the communication or reception of knowledge. How else, for instance, to explain the unquestioned acceptance of airplane safety videos, whose contents, only decades ago, were distributed in paper form? Instinctively we know that, when it comes to essential meanings, the medium does not generally have an impact on comprehension. And, despite the obvious attractions of McLuhanism for detailed media analyses, varied linguistic studies have concluded that, at the level of comprehension and learning, it makes no difference if the knowledge-producing object is a hypertextual medium or a printed medium. Presented with the same information on a page or screen, and with all other things being equal, learners or readers will generally learn and read at the same rate, and with the same rates of accuracy. If it is a provocative conclusion, it is one that is at least generally supported by an attestation expressed by various textual theorists: that the move from analogue to digital texts is far from “an absolute paradigm shift.” And, in any case, doing away with this distinction allows us to address the emotional and affective economy of busywork, to gain fresh insight into the desires or drives (triebs) that lead some of us to engage in busywork as a matter of priority, and of the rewards or compromises that flow therefrom.

The discussion of paper texts reminds me of remarks once uttered by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, remarks that gesture at the erotic allure of busywork, and which are not at all—excuse the pun—immaterial in this note, which addresses busywork in the digital context, the newer ecology in which we busy ourselves today. For those authors, the seduction of busywork lay in the fetishism of “fondling records”—of, in other words, paper shuffling. As they write,

The truth is that sexuality is everywhere: the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, a judge administers justice, a businessman causes money to circulate; the way the bourgeoisie fucks the proletariat; and so on.

Here we see an instance of the aftereffects of busywork. The bureaucrat who “fondles his records” does so while remembering the gratification he has received not only in compiling but in coming to possess and rely on them. For what is likely to be remembered, here, and what is likely to be continuously incanted as the documents are stroked, is the accomplishment of the task that engendered them. It is an act of self-assurance, a performative recitation of the very same pleasure that coincided with these documents’ original production. And yet, the word “production” here, as with all nouns related to engenderment, is misleading, as it is an ersatz efficacy, and in fact a false economy, that underlies the busywork of administration. (No wonder, then, that so many contemporary administrative processes have become automated. Institutions and governments have come to realise the essential paradox of modern-day administration, the circuitous logic of busywork in the age of digital reproduction: however useful the busywork may actually be, and no matter how large the return on investment, it is at once always too expensive (for bureaucrats, after all, are well paid) and never cheap enough—at least not when automation offers the tantalising hope, the utopian dream, of costless administration, of free busywork.)

In all of its banality and repetitiousness, and in spite of its obvious irrelevance, busywork imbues the busyworker with the validating pleasure of realising their effectiveness and productivity, a requisite catharsis that is central to the emotional wellbeing of all humans, to our feelings of stability and security in the world, and perhaps just as central to the lives of most (other) animals. And it is no surprise that, like a child who grips a teddy or doll (or, perhaps more likely today, their iPhone), the bureaucrat is said to keep a caressing hand on their documents. For in each case, the object marks the symbolic vessel into which so much of the subject’s exertions, so much of their energies, have been channelled. It hardly seems relevant whether those exertions have been “productive” on any objective accounting of performance—whether those exertions have had greater benefit to society, to research, or to the economy, for instance. The triviality of the work, which is to say of the busywork, is of no importance, just so long as it is capable of producing the emotional discharge, the catharsis, for which it was undertaken (unconsciously or not).

Of course, many pursuits are trivial in precisely the same way as administrative busywork is trivial. Online gaming, for instance, is often acknowledged as an activity that provides the gamer with the short-term emotional rewards they may desire, and yet is also liable to problematic, if not plainly destructive and compulsive overuse, can become an excessive and problematic preoccupation that affects the gamer’s life in other, seemingly unjustifiable ways. And sports and other recreational activities, including running, might also be regarded as comparable to busywork, at least insofar as these activities are also liable to dependence behaviours. All of this, of course, assumes that busywork is itself the product of an addiction or a compulsion, an assumption that I am late to address. However, rather than turning to the cognitive science, psychological, or psychiatric literature, I would like to now supplement my discussion of busywork with a brief historical excursion into the life of Sigmund Freud, specifically relating to his close friendship with Wilhelm Fleiss.

Fleiss was the German Jewish throat and mouth surgeon (otolaryngologist) whom Freud had befriended just after Freud and Josef Breuer had published their Studies on Hysteria in 1895, and after which Freud parted ways with Breuer, whom he had scolded (at least privately) for a dubious incident involving “Anna O.,” Breuer’s patient. Didier Anzieu has written about the relationship that subsequently developed between Freud and Fleiss. As Anzieu notes, Freud and Fleiss were “bound together by their noses,” sutured in a strong “bond made all the stronger by cocaine.” Whereas Freud had “revealed the substance to medicine, and only just failed to discover its anaesthetic properties,” Fleiss had adopted the substance as his go-to medical tool for almost all nose complaints, urging “his patients, Freud’s patients, and Freud himself to undergo treatment of the affected parts of the nose with a local application of cocaine.” In many ways, Freud both depended on and idealised Fleiss, whom he called on often for prescriptions of cocaine. As time wore on, however, and notably after Freud had faced two transformative incidents, he and Fleiss’s relationship began to break down.

What is of significance in this biographical history for the purposes of this note’s discussion of busywork? The answer lies in the distinction between busywork and “effective work or achievement” that Freud would soon come to focus on, a distinction that he would use to define the difference between himself and Fleiss as he began to distance himself from his colleague at the turn of the century. Patrick Mahony has drawn attention to the destructive impact that performing only busywork had on Fleiss during this period, both in terms of Fleiss’s own health (increasingly poor under the strain of his cocaine addiction and associated bouts of paranoia), and in terms of his professional reputation as an academic scientist, most notably relating to his loss of standing before Freud himself. In fact, as Mahony suggests, it was Fleiss’s increased tendency to prioritise busywork over serious scholarship that led to Freud’s dismissal or “deidealisation” of his once-beloved colleague, a man for whom Freud, as he would later suggest to a friend, had once harboured not just amorous but erotic feelings. As Mahony writes,

In his narcissistically influenced break with Fliess, the conquistadorial Freud was expecting more than prolific production per se. As time went on, the author of a publishing cure became less enchanted with Fliess’s orally delivered flights of imagination, and attributed mounting significance to the qualitative distinction between Arbeit (work in general) and Leistung (effective work or achievement)—a crucial distinction often obfuscated in Strachey’s translation in the Standard Edition. The record speaks for itself. In 1897, Fliess published a book completed the previous year; between 1897 and 1900, however—the period when the great masterpiece of psychoanalysis was being penned—Fliess published but one short article, a state of affairs that periodically stirred Freud, even while he still considered Fliess as his critical reader and unique “Other,” to vent his disillusionment about Fliess’s lack of effective work in a series of ironical remarks.

A major factor in Freud’s deidealization of his alter ego Fliess, therefore, was the recognition of the increasing gap between the latter’s self-glorifying busywork, and his capacity to externalize or transfer (übertragen) it into publication—that is, into a substantial amount of effective written performance that could be evaluated by the scientific community at large.

Mahony’s account is interesting for a number of reasons, not least because of the implications it has for Freud’s own view about the emotional economy of busywork. Mahony suggests that Freud must have wished to end his friendship with Fleiss, not because he resented him after his “bungled surgery on Emma Eckstein,” but because he viewed Fleiss as timorous and weak-willed, as a scholar who was just not courageous enough to produce in writing—and to publish—what his oral presentations presaged. As Mahony writes, “The Interpretation of Dreams marks Freud’s distance from the publicly less adventurous Fliess, and it stands as an example of how Freud’s taking the risk of a partial writing out did not vitiate the overall status of his scientific and textual masterpiece.”

To achieve a “partial writing out,” then, involves taking a “risk,” involves a willingness to fail, to be ridiculed, as well as a wish to be recognised. Indeed, when Mahony refers to Freud as conquistadorial, the adjective is no mere decoration. In a letter to Fleiss of 1900, Freud identified himself as just such an explorer:

For I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador—an adventurer, if you want it translated—with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity of a man of this sort.

By contrast, those who compulsively engage in arbeit—busywork, or “work in general”—may be expected to exhibit a distinctive pattern of risk-avoidance, to be otherwise commonly engaged in compulsive or addictive behaviours (such as in Fleiss’s case), and, in short, to be lacking in the “curiosity, daring, and tenacity” characteristic of, in Freud’s appellation, the conquistador.

Freud would go on to write of “repetition compulsion” in 1920 as “the manifestation of the power of the repressed.” It is a conceptualisation of repeated behaviours (such as those often brought into action during busywork) that understands them as the reflections, as the symptoms, of the now-repressed disappointments and frustrated desires of the scorned infant. However, Freud’s varied examples of these behaviours do not strike the reader as examples of busywork; in all its banality, in its inanity and innocuousness, and owing to its apparent lack of, say, suitable new targets for deeply emotional feelings—“objects for their jealousy”—busywork does not, at first instance, appear to be a suitable way for a traumatised individual to repeat their “unpleasure,” not the kind of performance that is likely to sate the urges of the individual who, for one reason or other, is led to “repeat painful traumatic experiences and to recreate inner issues and relationships from the past.”

And yet, if we are to interpret busywork more broadly, and at the same time offer a narrow example, it begins to appear as an excellent candidate for Freud’s conceptualisation of repetition compulsion. Take, say, the “unofficial” example of busywork given to us by the narrative of Freud’s relationship with Fleiss. Here the otolaryngologist begins to busily postulate ever more improbable psychological theories in various unpublished documents (letters, for instance), as well as to communicate them orally; but he never publishes these ideas in scientific journals. In this case we can begin to see ways in which busywork—specifically writing and thinking but not publishing—may in fact function as a profoundly appropriate substitute for the trauma that comes from unsuccessfully performing the so-called “real work” (Leistung), which, in this case, would be constituted by Fleiss’s publication and dissemination of his theories and ideas. So, it might be said that the author who is led to write continuously but does not change their writing habits or patterns—and who never concludes their writing, their work thus forever remaining in draft form—may be understood, if not as a candidate for hypergraphia or a related disorder, as having been given over to a repetition compulsion. And while the repeated behaviour may well take the form of a completely unrelated performance (so that a writing disorder, such as hypergraphia, need not be based on a traumatic writing experience), the compulsion might also be said, in Fleiss’s case, to have been precipitated by the very trauma of not producing, say, publishable or rewardable writing in the past. Or, more to the point, we could say that it has been precipitated by the trauma of having produced only poor writing—work that has been severely criticised or impugned by precisely those whom one writes for.

There is much more that I could write on this subject—on repetition compulsion specifically, on busywork as an example of the same, and on writing as an incidental spur to emotional and psychological trauma. (The irony of saying so not is not lost on me.) However, at the risk of giving myself only more busywork, I will save those impulses for future notes.

My research is supported by the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions.